Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

that the author is a man of rank and fortune. Yes! The author of The Monk signs himself
a LEGISLATOR! We stare and tremble.” Indeed, what alarmed Coleridge the most was
the prospect that England’s upper classes were participating in the production and
distribution of works that had been perceived to be unsuitable for an educated audience
and to contribute to the vulgarization of English taste. Moreover, Coleridge’s review of
The Monk pointed to its transgressive character by claiming that Lewis exceeded the
“nice boundaries, beyond which terror and sympathy are deserted by the pleasurable
emotions.” As mentioned earlier, in writing The Italian as a response, Radcliffe sought
to defend and reassert the role of these boundaries, and in his review, Coleridge
concludes, “The Italian may justly be considered as an ingenious performance; and many
persons will read it with great pleasure and satisfaction.” Nevertheless, Coleridge’s
evaluation of Radcliffe’s novel was not entirely positive, for he lamented her lack of
originality within the larger framework that it announced the decline of her favored
genre, the romance. Indeed, Coleridge’s review appears at a moment in Radcliffe’s
career (1798) when the perception of Radcliffe as a successful writer of romances was
being superseded by other more negative perspectives regarding her craft—mostly,
according to Watt, because she was writing in what was considered an unimportant and
minor genre and lacked originality, systematically employing identical literary devices
over and over (125). On the other hand, Lewis’ boldness had a more enduring quality:
his “daring” originality was constantly celebrated and The Monk set precedence for
further works of so-called “horror Gothic.” According to Watt, Lewis’ text established
an unparalleled standard of boldness which would later influence the likes of Scott and
Maturin (92).
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